Hal Clement - Cycle of Fire

“I never heard such nonsense in my whole year of life!”

“Of course you haven’t. Neither have your friends in other cities. But how will they know it’s nonsense? Will they dare take the chance?” He paused, but no answer came from the radio. “I still think that there’s no need for your people to fly off into space just because they learn a little physics. Aren’t they as capable of seeing the dangers involved as you are?”

“Wait. I must think.” Silence reigned for many minutes, broken only by a faint crackle of static. Kruger waited tensely.

“You have taught me something, human being.” The Teacher’s voice finally sounded again. “I will not tell you what it is. But Dar Lang Ahn’s Teachers may learn what they can.” He said no more.

Kruger relaxed, with a grin spreading over his face. The plan would work; it couldn’t fail, now.

Dar Lang Ahn would soak up vast quantities of information, enough to fill many books — books which could not possibly be written before the time of dying. Dar Lang Ahn would return to the Ice Ramparts with his knowledge, and he would still be dictating it or writing it himself when the time came to seal the caverns against the rising temperature and changing atmosphere. He would still be inside when that happened, not out in the cities of the “cold” people dying with his fellows. Dar Lang Ahn, by sheer necessity, would become a Teacher; and Nils Kruger would not lose his little friend.

ABYORMEN IS larger than the earth and has a smaller percentage of sea area even in the cold time, so the geologists had a great deal of territory to cover. They did not, of course, attempt to do it all; the basic plan was to attempt enough stratigraphic correlation to get a fair idea of its geological history and, if at all possible, find datable radio-actives in the series far enough down to get at least a minimum value for the age of the planet. The last was all the astronomers really wanted, but the biologists had considerably higher standards. They came along, prepared to analyze any fossils found by every technique known to their field.

Layer after layer of sedimentary rock was traced, sometimes for miles underground, sometimes only yards before it vanished — perhaps because quakes had shuffled it into a puzzle that took experience to solve, perhaps because the phenomena which had deposited it in the first place had covered only a limited area and the formation pinched out naturally. A limestone bed laid down over a million square miles at the bottom of a sea is one thing; a sandstone lens that was once the delta of a stream running into a small lake is something else — sometimes a rather inconvenient something else, when a problem of relative dates is in question.

Kruger thanked his luck that Commander Burke was not with this ground party and prayed constantly that he would not overhear any remarks made by the geologists, for Dar Lang Ahn was learning a good deal of English as time went on, and there are few places where a photographic memory can make itself more obvious or useful than in a stratigraphy problem. The geologists without exception regarded the native with awe and felt a friendship for him comparing strongly with Kruger’s own. Sooner or later the commander would learn; the boy hoped that by then his little friend’s popularity would have reached a point where the old officer would be moved to get rid of his suspicions.

Nowhere on the planet did there seem to be structures corresponding with the “shields” which characterize certain parts of Earth. Apparently all the present land surface had been submerged in the not too distant past; there was more than a suggestion that Abyormen suffered much more seismic and orogenic activity than Earth. One of the specialists suggested that a reason for this might lie in the “Long Year” seasonal changes, when the greater part of the sea water was deposited on the ice caps. A seismic check of the cap in the southern hemisphere ( not over the south pole) indicated a thickness of nearly thirty-five thousand feet. It was snowing at the time the check was made, Theer never shone on this part of the planet, and Arren would not rise for several terrestrial years.

While several of Abyormen’s short years passed before any absolute dating of strata was possible, the astronomers learned what they had feared rather quickly. From the beginning, of course, the geologists had kept their eyes open for pegmatites and other igneous intrusions which might contain radioactives suitable for dating, and fairly soon these were found at several places on the continent they were examining. It was not possible to correlate these rocks with the sedimentaries, at the time, but one of them had a uranium-lead ratio corresponding to an age of just under one and a half billion years. It was a large sample, and ten independent checks were run, none varying more than about twenty million years from the mean. Since the astronomers were not willing to believe that Alcyone had been in existence longer than something like one per cent of that time they accepted the information a trifle glumly.

But dated or not, the sedimentaries had their own fields of interest. If Dar Lang Ahn had ever seen a fossil in his life he had never given it a second thought. This omission was easily remedied, for the sediments had their share of organic remains. A lens of limestone some two hundred miles across, near the center of the continent, seemed to consist largely of a reef deposit, and several hundred different species were found at various points within it. Shellfish that might have come straight from Earth were present by the thousands — at least, so it appeared to Kruger; a biologist spent much time pointing out technical differences.

“I suppose,” he finished, “that you could find a good many creatures virtually identical with these on the shores of your present oceans. There seems to be some ability in the mollusks and their relatives to ride out the changes of a planet. On Earth they’ve been around for half a billion years — changed, to be sure, but the basic plan seems to keep right on going.”

“I understand you in all but one point,” Dar Lang Ahn replied in his slow, careful English. “I have been with you all along here, and have seen fossils like this in many different layers of rock, as you say is reasonable, but I have never seen a living creature which in any way resembles those fossils.”

“Have you ever spent any length of time at the seashore?”

“Much. Nils Kruger and I walked along one for about three hundred miles recently, if the occasions in my previous eight hundred years don’t count.”

“That’s right!” Kruger exclaimed excitedly. “I knew there was something funny about that beach and never could put my finger on it. There weren’t any seashells, or stranded jellyfish, or anything of that nature. No wonder it looked queer!”

“Hmph. I confess that is distinctly odd. How about other sea creatures?”

“I don’t know. I think there are animals of various sorts living in the water, and I’m sure there are plants. I can’t think of very many different kinds, though.” The biologist gave this bit of information to those of his colleagues engaged in field work; he himself was too busy with fossil correlation to follow it up.

Gradually he established order out of the chaos. For purposes of discussion, he divided Abyormen’s past into periods whose boundaries in time seemed to have been established by the general flooding of this continent which had resulted in the limestone beds. The geologists could not find evidence for definite periods of mountain-building, which are usually better for such a purpose; on Abyormen, as they had already suspected, orogenic activity seemed to be fairly uniformly distributed through time.